


oh and you in all your vibrant youth (how could anything bad ever happen to you?)

by AquaMarinara



Category: Little Women (2019), Little Women Series - Louisa May Alcott
Genre: Canon Compliant, Missing Scene, Ruminations on illness and death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-02
Updated: 2020-07-02
Packaged: 2021-03-05 04:55:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 917
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25038817
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AquaMarinara/pseuds/AquaMarinara
Summary: "Where her sisters walk, Beth floats. She’s always felt like a living ghost."orHow Beth comes to accept her fate.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 15





	oh and you in all your vibrant youth (how could anything bad ever happen to you?)

**Author's Note:**

> many thanks to my beta @ithoughtyoulikedmereckless for all the edits and support. at first i was worried that this would be too short to post to ao3, but it's here now, at singsongsung's (@anniemurphys) insistence. i love you both very much.
> 
> i hope you all enjoy it <3
> 
> (title from Hunger by Florence + the Machine)

Where her sisters walk, Beth floats. She’s always felt like a living ghost.

Her skin glows when held above the flaming tip of a candle. Light pinks and bright reds. Pale white under the sun, as if she’s fading with every day.

Her dresses engulf her, too big hand-me-downs from Meg. (Jo’s are always ruined.) The skirt billows as she moves, fans out as she sits. Her fingers straighten out the creases, a never ending task. She doesn’t mind. They don’t hurt like the rest of her, and if they never stop moving then neither will she.

She floats from room to room, house to house. Or rather, she used to.

Now, Beth feels more like a half-dead spirit, inching closer to the phantasmical than ever before. Certainly more than when she’d slept for days on end due to a bout of scarlet fever. 

The couch has become her home within a home, the place where she eats, sleeps, watches the world go by. There are fewer people to watch than before: Amy’s in Europe, Jo in New York, Meg down the road. Even at various distances, they all feel just as far, just as unreachable. Marmee writes them, and they write back, but Marmee doesn’t know. No one does.

Her fingers still on occasion. Tears fall when she notices, tracing lines down her cheeks, but then she wipes them away and her hands find a use again.

Laurie stops by every now and then, but he looks just as lost as she feels. His eyes glaze over when he looks around the sitting room, and he never stays more than a few minutes.

She wonders what he sees when he comes over, if he too remembers the scenes from their childhood as if they were performed in Jo’s plays. If he can pick any object in the room and associate it with one of her sisters: the bucket Amy stuck her foot in, or the ribbons that once tied up Meg’s curls. She can.

Jo’s mouse must be starving upstairs, but Beth can’t get herself to feed it.

She wonders if Jo even thinks about her mouse anymore, out in New York. The big city, full of people and opportunity. Beth would much rather stay here, before the fire, dolls in her lap, whose porcelain skin matches her own.

“Beth?” Laurie asks her, on one of the days that blends into all the others. She’d been staring at the snow outside, embroidering a new pair of slippers for Mister Laurence. His words disrupt the stillness in the house.

Beth hums without turning to look at him. She’s memorized his face by now, and all its variations in expression. He’s sulking, hunched over in the armchair, mouth pinched and fingers fiddling with the ring Jo had given him.

Pale, passionate. He’s a ghost like her, but with a fire in his eyes. He’s waiting for a breath of air to bring him back to life. Unlike her, he has a chance.

“That day on top of the hill, when we spoke of our castles in the air.” He sounds wistful, forlorn. Beth’s read enough by now to know what those words mean. “So much has changed since then, and my favourite one is no longer what it was.” From the corner of her eye, she sees his head fall to the side, feels his eyes search her face. “Is yours?”

He’s hurting, she knows. Jo left both of them behind, though Beth doesn’t blame her. She doubts Laurie does either. Jo’s castle, like Laurie’s, has taken a new shape.

Beth feels a love for Laurie she hadn’t felt before: one forged in kinship. She continues her handiwork as she attempts to find consoling words, attempts to understand how she’s grown as well.

(Perhaps she hasn’t grown enough. That thought scares her most of all.)

Back then, she’d wanted to climb those steps and reach behind herself for her sisters. She’d wanted to welcome them, and Marmee, Hannah, Father.

It seems odd that her dreams had felt so far away. They were right in front of her at the time, but now that her sisters have left the only way to achieve them would be climbing the steps to a castle in the sky, with no way back.

“Yes,” she tells Laurie, because it’s true. She still wants what she no longer has: her family safe at home, her sisters surrounding her.

She wants the safety of a childhood that’s slipping through her slimming fingers.

Laurie curls in on himself further. When she finally turns to look, he’s aged more than she could have imagined.

There are blues and purples under his eyes, lines etched on his forehead.

Her fingers reach for his, a comfort, a reminder that she’s still here. It pains her to shift her body weight across the couch, but she does. Then the sky darkens outside, her skin turning blue in the light, and she pulls back.

Beth finally understands. “It’s alright that you’ve changed, Laurie. The world has. Most people have, or will.”

Laurie finally looks up from his lap, from the ring on his finger. The fire in his eyes burns with a desperation she can’t relate to. He hasn’t reached his dream yet; Beth has moved past hers.

She’s no longer a living ghost: She’s skin, mind, heart. When those fail she’ll be a true ghost, living in her castle in the air, waiting peacefully for everyone she loves to follow.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading! please leave any and all thoughts below. much love <3


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